Tuesday, May 27, 2014

CSIRO and UTS visits

Today was a full day with two site visits. In the morning, we toured the CSIRO Division of Materials Science and Engineering, and in the afternoon we visited the University of Technology Sydney. In the morning, we toured the CSIRO Division of Materials Science and Engineering.

Here we saw a variety of labs within the building. The labs varied from studying diseases to keeping track of time.

Even the building itself was specially designed so experiments have limited interference. The windows are coated with gold to keep out radio waves and the walls are made of solid brick without metal reinforcements. This, however, made for long confusing hallways, and cell service is limited.

Many of the rooms needed special ventilation to do experiments. The building pictured below is the air conditioning. It is so large that it needs its own building!

The picture below shows one of the "yellow rooms" that can house highly infectious diseases.

Time for the laboratory is kept using the clock below. The clock is based on the standard that one second is equal to the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.

In the afternoon, we visited the University of Technology Sydney. Here we learned about topics such as nanotechnology for bioapplications.

We also toured the lab where we saw different instruments to measure and study nanoparticles and nearly anything at a small scale.